Cynthia Ozick is one of the most respected contemporary American authors, whose fiction, according to many critics, exemplifies “the Jewish writer oxymoron.” Ozick respects the Jewish Covenant and its tradition, but she uses her imagination to invent stories; she worries about the temptations of paganism and the dangers of idolatry, but she fabricates fictional golems; she strongly refuses the label “woman writer”, but she writes essays in defense of feminism, demanding equal rights with respect to the Torah; she despises the treatment of Jewish history (and of the Holocaust in particular) as fiction, but she “cannot not write about it”. In short, Cynthia Ozick's art resists narrow categorization and her fiction overcomes rigid confines, both literary and ideological. These intriguing thematic complexities and cultural intricacies, dealt with a robust sense of humor and stylistic richness, deserve to be brought to the attention of the Italian reading public. In fact, if Ozick's belletristic reputation has been amply recognized in the United States, her popularity in Italy is still scant as very little of her production has been translated into Italian. The aim of this dissertation is to offer a sample of Cynthia Ozick's literary production as representative of both contemporary American literature and Jewish culture. Ozick's poems, short stories, and essays—which have been grouped in three different sections—have been chosen to introduce the author's kaleidoscopic production as reflective of her immense variety of interests and mental acuteness. Moreover, Cynthia Ozick's work is also used to exemplify some of the major recent shifts in translation studies, showing how the degree of her popularity in Italy depends on a slow dynamic, aimed at filling cultural gaps or at mapping new emerging cultural and religious geographies. Ozick's reception in Italian, in fact, raises significant linguistic and cultural problems including assimilation and marginality, the clash between the periphery and the center, and the use of translation as the process of canonization of a foreign writer who is also the representative of a “weak” literature, in the sense given by Itamar Even-Zohar in his Polysystem Theory.

Latin American writers have seldom limited themselves to monogeneric expression, both by taste and by necessity. Modern examples can be found on the foremost 'Boom' writers: Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez who, while being known mostly for narrative fiction, where they have produced important and enduring works, have essayed other genres. They have shown interest in various forms of visual and aural arts: drama, film and radio scripts, as demonstrated by Cortazar's Los reyes, Nada a Pehuajo and Adios, Robinson; Fuentes' Todos los gatos son pardos, El tuerto es rey and Orquideas a la luz de la luna; Vargas Llosa's La senorita de Tacna, Kathie y el hipopotamo and La Chunga; and Garcia Marquez' El secuestro. As they have acknowledged an influence of cinematic and dramatic techniques on their narrative, adopting the genres themselves is a natural development and for some a return to their first works. The generic differences lying between the perception of the visual and auditive images of drama and film and the concept of the mental image of narration is one of the subjects focused on, covering ways in which they adapted technical and thematically to the change. The approach to the scripts has followed an eclectic methodology, basically semiotic, that takes into account thirteen sign systems in the written text and its intrinsic performance. As it studies the script, not its final production, only those aspects of staging revealed through the directions included and the text itself are covered. I have also focused on other traditional subjects: Title, Structure, Time, Space, Language, Characters and Themes, considering them as part of the meaningful substance of the whole system forming the work. The thematic aspects covered were isotopies, subjects that are developed through various systems, allowing the text to function as a whole. Coincidences between each author's works have been found, proving the theory that they have prevailed between generic distinctions, creating according to their own rules not those imposed by traditional definitions.

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